Recounting My Successful Experience Upgrading My Solid State Hard Drive

Question

I just successfully upgraded my solid state hard drive from
60 gigabytes to 256 ; the machine is a Lenovo T400s - while the upgrade is
still fairly fresh, I thought I’d share my experience – maybe someone else will
benefit – most of what I’m about to relay was provided by Zoltanthegypsy and
GMAC-R60 – I thank them again for their advice - but I will try to add some
additional thoughts based on my experience – for the most part I was able to
use the tools provided by Lenovo – my original hard drive had 3 partitions, S
(system), C ( windows + my programs & data), & Q ( Lenovo stuff like
backup and restore, the factory copy, etc.) :
Create a “factory state” copy of the machine to
DVD or CD soon after purchase – I say soon after purchase because it appears that
a minimum amount of hard disk space is required – my 60 gig was almost full and
I got a message that there wasn’t enough space – I can still make the copy but
I’ll have to move some things off temporarily – this step isn’t really related
to the upgrade but it is a good idea –  Start/Lenovo ThinkVantage Tools and you’ll see
the option – and as Zoltanthegypsy has pointed out you will most likely not be
able to do this from the new hard drive after the restore operation covered
below – I haven’t proven this out but I do know that my Q space on the new
drive is smaller than before – something was lost and it’s most likely the
factory state – and so keep the old hard drive long enough to make that factory
state copy to DVD or CD.
The next step was a full backup to a Lenovo
external hard drive – it came with one partition - the external that I got from
Lenovo has a small keypad and is password enabled – this fact will come into
play further on – as GMAC-R60 noted a pop-up will appear giving the option to
create rescue media – you want to select this option so that the external will be
bootable.
When the backup is complete you want to swap hard
drives making sure to first unplug & remove the battery .
There may be other ways to do this next step but
here’s what I did – I powered on the machine and let it go through what
appeared to be a BIOS routine – note that my external was attached to the
laptop but it wasn’t activated by keying in the password – after the BIOS
routine was finished I activated the external by typing in the password and then
did a Control/Alt/Delete – the machine restarted and booted from the external –
with hindsight I probably could have connected & activated the external
before powering on but the instructions that came with the external suggested
something different which didn’t work for me .
I was now able to go into rescue and recovery
and do a complete restore to the new drive – but to my surprise the extra space
that I bought with the new drive ended up all in the Q partition – and Windows
Disk Management didn’t enable me to reallocate the space to C.
And so I purchased Disk Director 11 Home by
Acronis – a $50.00 investment in a tool that I’ll probably never use again but
I’m now able to use an $800 solid state drive rather than trying to recoup some
money via Ebay -– within minutes I was able to reclaim the space and I now have
enough C space to last the lifetime of the laptop – especially since all
pictures go on a stick & my demographic isn’t into video games .
One useful piece of information that I got from
a user on the Acronis forum was that all of the Lenovo tools like rescue and
recovery, etc. are available for download from the Lenovo website – and so if worse
came to worse I could have deleted that Q partition, stretched C using Windows
Disk Management , and then downloaded the Lenovo tools into C.
One thing I’d like to learn to do would be to
perform all the steps outlined above but without using the Lenovo tools – using
Windows 7 tools instead but not having a Windows CD , i.e. how do you boot

Answer 1

It went something like this:
(On the stock drive)
Plugged in a blank USB HDD, and a blank USB flash drive.
- HDD formatted in NTFS, flash drive in FAT16.
Ran the recovery media creator.
- Created bootable media on flash drive, and put the recovery image on the HDD.
Once done, shutdown, removed the battery, swapped the drive for a 500GB Scorpio Black (freshly NTFS quick-formatted). USB HDD and flash drive were still attached.
Booted, and used F12 to select the flash drive for booting.
It booted into the Windows Recovery Environment and I chose the Lenovo restore factory image option at the bottom of the list.
From there on out, I just clicked through the wizard, and it restored.
Upon finishing, I unplugged all of the external media, and had it restart. It then booted into OOBE as expected.
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